What The Stakes Are

I feel like I’m going crazy. I have a pit of terror in my stomach that never goes away. I am stressed and afraid at every moment.

To me, a set of facts about the world is difficult to deny:

1. If Donald Trump is reelected in November, very bad things will happen to a large number of people. Climate change will worsen. The brutalization of immigrants will escalate, with dementia patients and diabetics deported to their deaths. Workplace safety and labor protections will be gutted. Public assets from the national parks to the postal service will be sold off to corporations. A global arms race will intensify, possibly with civilization-ending weapons placed in outer space, waiting to destroy us at a moment’s notice.
2. To stop these things from happening, we have exactly one chance on exactly one day: Nov. 3, 2020. On that day, something extremely difficult must be done: well over 60 million people must be motivated enough to put aside whatever else they are doing in their lives in order to go to polling stations and cast ballots. 
3. Donald Trump will do whatever it possibly takes to prevent this from happening. He has a colossal amount of money. He is ruthless. He will say anything. Do anything. He will attack candidates from the left if he has to. He will mock their physical appearance. He will lie about them shamelessly. And he is the most powerful man in the world. Trump has the triple advantages of incumbency, low unemployment, and a decent approval rating. It will be incredibly difficult for anyone to beat him. 
4. The Democratic party “establishment,” meaning the people who have been in leadership positions in the party, does not actually understand Trump. They do not see why his message is appealing. They don’t understand how talented he is. They think he is stupid. They don’t know why he thrives, and they don’t understand why they’re failing to effectively oppose him. When his approval rating rises, it mystifies them. When nobody comes to their rallies, they don’t know why. They didn’t get what was going on in 2016, when their own message was totally out-of-touch with ordinary people’s concerns. They will not admit that his State of The Union address was terrifyingly effective. They think that by pointing out that Trump is a liar and a cad, they can hurt him.
5. Even in a concerningly out-of-touch and inept party, Joe Biden stands out as uniquely out of touch and inept. It’s not just that he seems mentally not-that-with-it, but that he fundamentally can’t organize people. He certainly can’t inspire them. In fact, Biden’s political instincts are atrocious: he constantly told Iowa voters to “go vote for someone else,” and 85% of them did. He tells millennials he has “no empathy” for them. He promises no change. He is a serial liar who fabricates absurd details about his life story, like fictitious arrests and a history of civil rights activism.
6. The only other Democratic candidate than Joe Biden who has a viable chance at the Democratic nomination is Bernie Sanders. This is almost universally accepted. 
7. Between the two of them, Bernie Sanders is the only one with even a chance of beating Trump. As in 2016, Bernie is different from other Democrats in that he knows how to speak to Trump’s own voters. Not only does he beat Trump consistently in head-to-head polling, but he offers ordinary people an ambitious social democratic agenda that is designed to deal with their real-world problems. He has a decades-long record of fighting hard for them to get healthcare, decent wages, and family leave. He has waged an often lonely struggle on behalf of those whose interests are too frequently ignored in Washington, even taking on the Obama administration over cuts to Social Security. When Bernie tells working people he is in their corner, they can believe him, because he has acted on the same clear set of values for decades. Plus, Bernie’s supporters are motivated. They get out and knock doors for him in the cold. They will do whatever it takes for him. (And on the flipside, if Joe Biden was nominated, millions of them would probably not only decline to put in the same level of organizing energy, but would simply stay home, unwilling to assist a candidate who has made it clear he has no empathy for them.) 
8. Many wealthy and powerful Democrats will do whatever it takes to stop Bernie Sanders from being the nominee. This means that they will do whatever it takes to make sure that Joe Biden is the nominee. Already, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have dropped out and thrown their support behind Biden. Barack Obama has apparently “sent the signal” to Democrats that they need to come together behind Biden. Some Democrats even appear to be funneling money to supporting Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, so that she can continue to siphon enough votes away from Bernie Sanders to keep him from winning the nomination.
9. If these Democrats succeed in stopping Bernie, perhaps through a contested convention in which superdelegates override the plurality vote, and they put the feeble and uninspiring Biden at the top of the ticket, it will be an absolute calamity. Bernie’s supporters, many of whom already dislike the party for working hard to stop Bernie in 2016 and the incredibly fishy Iowa caucus shenanigans, will simply give up on the Democrats. Millennials will leave the party in droves, feeling that their votes don’t matter. Some will probably support a third party candidacy. Others will argue that in the interests of pragmatism, they should still vote for a dishonest and weak candidate who says he has no empathy for them. Their appeals will mostly fail. The party will be riven with bitter conflict. Biden will have no clear message, no strategy. He will perform embarrassingly in debates with Trump, forgetting his words and seeming to wonder why he is even on the stage. (He will also have no good explanation for what his son Hunter was doing for that Ukranian gas company, which will be the subject of constant discussion.) Trump, being a bully, will seize his advantage and relentlessly mock Biden’s performance. Trump will (as he has before) talk a lot about how Sanders was “robbed” by a “rigged” primary, delegitimize Biden’s nomination, and stoke the intra-party conflict. Biden will look dazed and confused on Election Night, as Democrats wonder yet again how they managed to lose to Donald Trump of all people. 
10. If Bernie is nominated, things will go differently, though we do not yet know quite how. Trump’s propaganda machine will try to brand Sanders a communist who hates America. Will this work? It is not clear. Sanders has been an open socialist in the public eye for a long time without it affecting his popularity, but the war that is waged against him will be relentless. And, of course, liberals might not pitch in to help Sanders. Many of them repeat right-wing talking points about him already, scaring people by implying Sanders wants to leave them uninsured. Sanders and his army of organizers will do their damndest to expose Trump for the fraud he is, to unite working-class people behind a candidacy that truly speaks to their interests, and behind an ambitious agenda for single-payer healthcare, a comprehensive climate plan, a living wage, and an end to the indentured servitude of student debt. Will they succeed? This I do not know. Everything else here seems clear as day to me. But how exactly a Sanders-Trump race will play out is mystifying indeed. There are strong reasons to believe Sanders will win, like his strong fundraising in Obama-Trump swing counties, voters’ high assessments of his honesty and credibility, his declining to antagonize conservatives on some cultural issues and ability to speak to conservative audiences, and of course, all of the actual polls. But I have never thought that it was certain Sanders will beat Trump. What I think is that it is certain any other Democrat will lose.

I run all these facts through my head all day, every day. If Trump gets reelected, untold horrors will be released. Unless Sanders prevails, Trump will get reelected. Therefore Sanders must prevail. We must do everything possible to get Sanders the nomination. There is no alternative.

This same reasoning seemed just as obvious to me in 2016, when Democrats didn’t notice that nominating Hillary Clinton was a catastrophic blunder, and proceeded to lose to Donald Trump, ignoring the warnings of people like me and Michael Moore. And when I say I feel like I’m “going crazy,” it’s because it’s really hard for me to believe that after all these years, the lessons have still not been learned. “Oh my God,” I think. “They’re really going to do it again. They’re still not going to nominate Bernie. They’re going to put up another establishment candidate, this time an even weaker one who doesn’t even have the promise of ‘historic change’ that Hillary would have represented.” They’re literally going to fight Bernie to the death, even if it very obviously would result in the suicide of the Democratic Party as an institution. (...)

It’s so weird to me that people don’t get this. Do they really believe the idiotic attacks on Bernie’s “radicalism”? Look at Bernie’s agenda: a national health insurance plan, of the kind that exists successfully all over the world. A giant ambitious climate investment plan, of the kind that we absolutely need if we are going to save the earth because this is a fucking emergency. A living wage that allows people to actually afford to pay their rent and feed themselves. What is the problem here? Why are people like Barack Obama and Beto O’Rourke prepared to destroy the Democratic Party and put the entire future of the planet at risk in order to stop this? What exactly is the threat that Bernie poses? (...)

The charitable answer, and the one they would probably give themselves, is that do not share my view of point #7 on my above list. They simply do not think Bernie is “electable.” They think he would lose to Donald Trump, that because he is too “far left” he would be the equivalent of George McGovern in 1972, and would lose in a landslide. They think he would hurt the prospects of “down ballot” Democrats, with Democratic members of Congress in conservative districts being forced to share the ticket with a socialist. They will insist that it is not Bernie’s agenda that they despise. They simply believe he threatens the party. He must be stopped at all costs in order to save democracy. I think many Democrats have probably convinced themselves of this, which is why some have been willing to entertain the prospect of nominating Mike Bloomberg to stop Sanders. If it takes a racist, sexist, transphobic Republican to save the party, so be it. Better victory with Bloomberg than defeat with Bernie. (...)

The fact that many high-up people in the Democratic party think this way is frightening. Because if they are completely convinced that Bernie can’t beat Trump, they’re not going to step aside at any point and let him be the nominee. They will fight him to the bitter end, because they will tell themselves that in doing so they are being pragmatic. If their actions result in tearing the party apart through a disastrous brokered convention, they will still insist that their actions were right, because they think anything that stops Bernie has to be done. Yes, even if that means overriding the popular vote with superdelegates.

But I don’t actually think it is harder for a left-wing candidate to win, and I think people who assume this assume it in part because they don’t really understand what the “left” is or what our theory is. Socialist values pose a significant threat to the wealth and power of certain people in society who have a strong self-interest in making sure people misunderstand and distrust socialists. But actually, the left stands for ideas that, once people understand them clearly and see through all the myths, have the possibility of mass appeal. Medicare for All is popular, and it would probably be far more popular if you explained to people exactly how it worked and what it would mean for them, and showed them how it would affect their pocketbooks and their experience with the healthcare system. Instead, pollsters ask things like “Would you support Medicare For All even if it took away your private insurance and increased your taxes?” and people get jittery, because they think that means they’re going to be uninsured and have less money. People try to mislead the public about what the left is trying to do, then when the public swallows the misconception, we are told that America rejects left ideas. It’s silly.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:
[ed. Exactly. So-called moderates risk losing a good segment of their party's base and generations of future voters because they're too pussified to support someone who's not down with business as usual. It's like abused spouse syndrome. See also: This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election (hint: pluralistic ignorance). Nautilus.]

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[ed. Good times.]

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The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions

When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.

The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk.

After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril—while Trump is still there.

James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be, I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.”

The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.

But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves—particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.

When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters loved—he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own.

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.

This is the story of how a great republic went soft in the middle, lost the integrity of its guts and fell in on itself—told through government officials whose names under any other president would have remained unknown, who wanted no fame, and who faced existential questions when Trump set out to break them.

by George Packer, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Patrick White
[ed. Must read. See also: What The Stakes Are, and The Failure of Democratic Opposition (Current Affairs).]

The Tyranny of Terrazzo: Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?

You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.

A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow; mint-green and mustard confetti; white, with black half-circles and two little dots — aha. Those are boobs. You look down. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.

All that pink. All those plants. All that white. It’s so clean! Everything’s fun, but not too much fun. And there, in the round mirror above the couch: It’s you. You know where you are. Or do you?

Search your brain. Swap out the monstera leaf for waxy red anthurium, WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE for GOOD VIBES ONLY. Maybe the pillows were succulent-print; maybe the ceramics had boobs. IT WAS ALL A DREAM, says a neon sign in schoolgirl cursive. You hadn’t noticed that before.

Maybe it is a dream, this room you do and don’t know, assembled from cliché and half-recollected spare parts; a fever dream — or, no, that’s too much. This room functions more like a CBD seltzer, something you might buy in a salmon-pink can. There’s not a lot of distinctive taste, but still, it’s hard to resist when you’re on a permanent search for ways to feel better. The ambience is palliative — simple but not severe. Even the palette faintly suggests a medicine cabinet: powdery pharmaceutical pastels, orange pill bottles, Band-Aid pink. (...)

Ever since modernism brought industry into design, tastes have cycled between embracing and rejecting what it wrought. A forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial appeal will give way to one that’s backward-looking, handmade, authenticity-obsessed — which will then give way to some new variation on tech-forward mass style. (Furniture dealers joke that “brown” goes in and out with every generation.) It’s a logic that gets filtered through the reliable desire for the world the way it looked when we were young, and lately this has meant looking back 30 or so years to the Memphis-inflected pastel pop of the ’80s and ’90s. We might call the latest iteration of the cycle the “millennial aesthetic” — not to say that it was embraced by all millennials, just that it came to prominence alongside them and will one day be a recognizable artifact of their era.

Consider a previous youth-style shorthand: the hipster, preeminent cultural punch line of the aughts. Both hipster and millennial were terms that drifted away from strict definitions (hipsters being subcultural, millennials being generational) to become placeholders for “whatever fussy young people seem to like.” It is strange, now, to remember a time when chunky-framed glasses were understood as a hipster affectation; today they just look like Warby Parker. The hipster aesthetic harked back to a grimy past: Its spaces were wood-paneled, nostalgic; perhaps they contained taxidermy. Behind lumberjack beards and ’70s rec-room mustaches, there was a desire for something preindustrial or at least pre-internet.

The hipster was Vice; the millennial is virtue, or at least virtuous consumption. The hipster aesthetic was capable of rendering even plain cotton T-shirts a little gross under the gaze of Dov Charney — the grossness was, indeed, part of the appeal. The millennial aesthetic, meanwhile, could take something disgusting and attempt — through sheer force of branding — to make it cute and fun. One such product, called “Come&Gone” (sans-serif logo, pastel website, friendly gifs), attracted notice on Twitter last year. Essentially a sponge on a stick, it was marketed as an “after-sex cleanup” device by a start-up “on a mission to ban the dripping, forever.”

Sometimes the hipster flirted with racism and misogyny, couched as irony or provocation — a certain performance of exclusivity (even just daring your audience not to get the joke or know the band) was central to the hipster aesthetic’s appeal. But the millennial aesthetic aims its appeal at everyone. Propagated by brands and advertisements, it is a fundamentally commercial aesthetic — and why alienate any potential customer? Millennial marketing showcases models of many races and body types, and the products on offer are obvious in their charms. Every sofa and soft-cup bra presents itself not as evidence of distinctive taste but as the most elegant, economical, and ethical solution to the problem of sofas or soft-cup bras. Simplicity of design encourages an impression that all errors and artifice have fallen away. The millennial aesthetic promises a kind of teleology of taste: as if we have only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at the objectively correct way for things to look.

If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then released into an economy where achievement held no guarantees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of special access, skills, or goods. It is style that can be borrowed, inhabited temporarily or virtually.

by Molly Fischer, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Fala Atelier

Coronavirus Will Test Our New Way of Life

Constant connectivity defines 21st-century life, and the infrastructure undergirding it all is both digital (the internet and our social media platforms) and physical (the gig economy, e-commerce, global workplaces). Despite a tumultuous first two decades of the century, much of our connected way of life has evaded the stress of a singular global event. The possibility of a global pandemic currently posed by the new coronavirus threatens to change that altogether. Should the virus reach extreme levels of infection globally, it would very likely be the first true test of the 21st-century way of life, laying bare the hidden fragility of a system that has long felt seamless.

The most obvious example is our global and connected economy, which has already weathered a deep recession. There could be shortages in crucial imports.

On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration reported one of its first shortages of a drug for human use (they did not specify which) as a result of supply chain disruptions. The agency is monitoring 63 manufacturers in China supplying medical devices “that may be prone to potential shortage if there is a supply disruption.”

Worries about the future of the global economy have had interest rates headed toward to record lows while oil prices have dropped. This past week the United States saw its worst weekly decline for stocks since the 2008 financial crisis. Major indexes around the world fell between 4 percent and 12 percent.

“It’s common when thinking about networks to talk about the trade-off between efficiency versus resilience,” Jon Stokes, a founder of Ars Technica and a deputy editor at The Prepared, an emergency preparedness site, told me recently. “Computers enable us to dial in the efficiency and complexity to insane degrees but we lose resilience in the system.”

“We design systems presuming a steady state of normalcy,” Mr. Stokes argued. “But now, we’re about to hit this big ball of stress imminently. It will flex the system in weird ways that will cause parts to snap. And it’s impossible to predict what will snap.”

A global pandemic also threatens to test other systems in ways that are harder to quantify. Chief among them: our complex information ecosystem. In the event of widespread illness, we’ll need to rely on accurate, vetted information to keep us safe. While the internet has made distribution easier than ever before, the democratization of information has created platforms and advertising economies built to reward misinformation.

When it comes to the coronavirus, the spread of misinformation hoaxes and rumors about the outbreak in China have plagued YouTube and Facebook while adapting to new platforms. As BuzzFeed News’s Ryan Broderick recently explained, “unverified videos from Chinese social media are shared by local Twitter influencers, viral WhatsApp forwards warn users of government advisories that don’t actually exist, and people share bogus cures for the virus.” Literal virality and online virality begin to mimic and influence each other.

Over the past few years, it has become clear that our social media ecosystem is easily hijacked to incentivize behavior from the worst actors, further amplifying existing tensions and disagreements. The result? A volatile political climate, where news is weaponized for political gain — a state further exacerbated by black-box algorithms protected as corporate secrets that dictate the information we see. Their unknowable nature breeds conspiratorial ideas about the flow and control of information. Trust in what we see online decreases, and news fatigue grows more widespread, especially among the least engaged political-news consumers. Those who are checked out become even more susceptible to cynicism and deception.

A global pandemic and its attendant fear and uncertainty will only add more strain into an already flawed and complex system. Politically, we can already see the contours of the information war around the coronavirus. For Democrats, the response to the virus is a demonstration of the failure of America’s health care and private insurance systems — and a way to highlight the incompetence of the Trump administration. At the same time, the Trump administration and the pro-Trump media ecosystem are invoking factual reporting about the seriousness of the virus and concern about government ineptitude to claim political bias and downplay the risks to Americans. A legitimate public health crisis becomes yet another choose-your-own-reality event, a wedge to amplify divisions.

Information pollution bleeds into our online commerce systems as well. Conspiracy grifters like the website Infowars are already stoking fears of government-caused food shortages, using fear to drive product sales. (...)

Amazon, which is the biggest retailer on the planet, operating in over 180 countries, also represents the connection between the digital and the physical. With its Prime same-day and second-day delivery, it has reshaped shopping behaviors, supported by millions of workers managing the logistics of delivery, package sorting and fulfillment warehouses.

The company’s labor practices have already come under fire, for long, demanding shifts, dangerous expectations for delivery drivers and wage issues. Such concerns would certainly be exacerbated by a global pandemic. Increased desire to prepare to shelter from the virus will no doubt drive up grocery and essentials orders. Should U.S. coronavirus cases spike, demand would probably increase drastically, forcing low-wage employees — even those who may feel sick — to report to work, subjecting them and others to contagions. But the reverse scenario also creates problems: Imagine an impending pandemic scenario where quarantines or shelter in place orders require warehouse and delivery employees to stay home, causing panic when Amazon can no longer guarantee or fulfill orders. (...)

Each example — and there are legions more, including our current campaign and election system, which is predicated on large public gatherings — is but one node in an enormous and extremely fragile network. It’s a network that has been building for centuries but that in the past two decades has grown through seamless connection to modern technology. Our way of life has shifted — from individuals to markets, from localized to globalized. So far, this interconnectivity has largely been a strength, creating a network so big that each of its smaller nodes can be imperfect or fail while the others persist. But much like a virus exploits a small vulnerability, creating a chain of reactions that allow it to weaken its host, a true global pandemic could work its way through the interconnected ecosystems that support our present way of life.

by Charlie Warzel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elizabeth R. Fischer/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories

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Unbuttoned

I’ve been writing about my father for ages, but when it comes to the details of his life, the year he graduated from college, etc., I’m worthless. Even his job remains a mystery to me. He was an engineer, and I like to joke that up until my late teens I thought that he drove a train. “I don’t really know all that much about him,” I said, scooting my chair closer to his recliner. He looked twenty years older than he had on my last visit to Raleigh, six months earlier. One change was his nose. The skin covering it was stretched tight, revealing facets I’d never before noticed. His eyes were shaped differently, like the diamonds you’d find on playing cards, and his mouth looked empty, though it was in fact filled with his own teeth. He did this thing now, opening wide and stretching out his lips, as if pantomiming a scream. I kept thinking it was in preparation for speech, but then he’d say nothing.

I was trying to push the obituary off on Lisa when we heard him call for water.

Hugh got a cup, filled it from the tap in the bathroom, and stirred in some cornstarch to thicken it. My father’s oxygen tube had fallen out of his nose, so we summoned a nurse, who showed us how to reattach it. When she left, he half raised his hand, which was purpled with spots and resembled a claw.

“What’s on your . . . mind?” he asked Amy, who had always been his favorite, and was seated a few yards away. His voice couldn’t carry for more than a foot or two, so Hugh repeated the question.

“What’s on your mind?”

“You,” Amy answered. “I’m just thinking of you and wanting you to feel better.”

My father looked up at the ceiling, and then at us. “Am I . . . real to you kids?” I had to lean in close to hear him, especially the last half of his sentences. After three seconds he’d run out of steam, and the rest was just breath. Plus the oxygen machine was loud.

“Are you what?”

“Real.” He gestured to his worn-out body, and the bag on the floor half filled with his urine. “I’m in this new . . . life now.”

“It’ll just take some getting used to,” Hugh said.

My father made a sour face. “I’m a zombie.”

I don’t know why I insisted on contradicting him. “Not really,” I said. “Zombies can walk and eat solid food. You’re actually more like a vegetable.”

“I know you,” my father said to me. He looked over at Amy, and at the spot that Gretchen had occupied until she left. “I know all you kids so well.”

I wanted to say that he knew us superficially at best. It’s how he’d have responded had I said as much to him: “You don’t know me.” Surely my sisters felt the way I did, but something—most likely fatigue—kept them from mentioning it.

As my father struggled to speak, I noticed his fingernails, which were long and dirty.

“If I just . . . dropped out of the sky like this . . . you’d think I was a freak.”

“No,” I said. “You’d think you were a freak, or at least a loser.”

Amy nodded in agreement, and I plowed ahead. “It’s what you’ve been calling your neighbors here, the ones parked in the hall who can’t walk or feed themselves. It’s what you’ve always called weak people.”

“You’re a hundred per cent right,” he said.

I didn’t expect him to agree with me. “You’re vain,” I continued. “Always were. I was at the house this morning and couldn’t believe all the clothes you own. Now you’re this person, trapped in a chair, but you’re still yourself to us. You’re like . . . like you were a year ago, but drunk.”

“That’s a very astute . . . observation,” my father said. “Still, I’d like to . . . apologize.”

“For being in this condition?” I asked.

He looked over at Amy, as if she had asked the question, and nodded.

Then he turned to me. “David,” he said, as if he’d just realized who I was. “You’ve accomplished so many fantastic things in your life. You’re, well . . . I want to tell you . . . you . . . you won.”

A moment later he asked for more water, and drifted mid-sip into that neither-here-nor-there state. Paul arrived, and I went for a short walk, thinking, of course, about my father, and about the writer Russell Baker, who had died a few weeks earlier. He and I had had the same agent, a man named Don Congdon, who was in his mid-seventies when I met him, in 1994, and who used a lot of outdated slang. “The blower,” for instance, was what he called the phone, as in “Well, let me get off the blower. I’ve been gassing all morning.”

“Russ Baker’s mother was a tough old bird,” Don told me one rainy afternoon, in his office on Fifth Avenue. “A real gorgon to hear him tell it, always insisting that her son was a hack and would never amount to anything. So on her deathbed he goes to her saying, ‘Ma, look, I made it. I’m a successful writer for the New York Times. My last book won the Pulitzer.’ ”

“She looked up at him, her expression blank, and said, ‘Who are you?’ ”

I’ve been told since then that the story may not be true, but still it struck a nerve with me. Seek approval from the one person you desperately want it from, and you’re guaranteed not to get it.

As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you—assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you—that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them, and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.

by David Sedaris, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ross MacDonald

China’s Bookstores Band Together To Survive the Epidemic

China’s Bookstores Band Together To Survive the Epidemic (Sixth Tone).

[ed. Cool pics of China's bookstores. Also, businesses that "rely heavily on social gatherings and in-person experiences" are likely to be more vulnerable than others.]

Bloomberg Has Hired the Vice Chairs of the Texas and California Democratic Parties

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has hired two state Democratic party vice chairs in Super Tuesday states with two of the top three highest number of pledged delegates. Bloomberg hired Texas Democratic Party Vice Chair Carla Brailey as a senior adviser to his campaign in December, and he hired California State Democratic Party Vice Chair Alexandra Rooker for a similar role in January.

Both Brailey and Rooker are superdelegates who will likely vote for the Democratic presidential nominee at the party’s national convention this summer. Hiring the leadership of a state party doesn’t appear to break any campaign laws, but it indicates Bloomberg’s intent to effectively purchase political support, said Brendan Fischer, the federal reform program director at the Campaign Legal Center. “This does seem to fit a longstanding pattern of Bloomberg using his billions to help generate support among political elites,” he said.

Rooker is one of two members of Bloomberg’s campaign staff who also sits on the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee, which recommends rules for the convention, the convention agenda, the convention’s permanent officers, amendments to the party’s charter, and other resolutions. In November, the month he entered the presidential race, Bloomberg gave $320,000 to the DNC, his first contributions to the committee since 1998. (He was a registered Republican from 2001 to 2007, after which he became an independent. He registered as a Democrat in 2018.) He also donated $10,000 to the Texas Democratic Party, where Brailey has been vice chair since June 2018, as well as $10,000 to the California Democratic Party. Brailey, Rooker, and the Bloomberg campaign did not respond to requests for comment on their hiring. (...)

Bloomberg will appear on the ballot for the first time on Super Tuesday, March 3. His campaign has poured tens of millions of dollars into both Texas and California where there are 228 and 416 delegates up for grabs, respectively.

by Akela Lacy, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: Steve Breen, via
[ed. Swamp people. So far, everything I've read about the DNC's so-called leadership is pretty disgusting. Speaking of which, superdelegates: DNC Superdelegate Promoting Brokered Convention is a Significant GOP Donor, Health Care Lobbyist (The Intercept); and A Field Guide for Bloomberg-Campaign Deputy Digital Organizers (New Yorker)]

British models showcasing Jaguars at the Geneva Motor Show in 1973
via:

The Dirtbag Media

The Pied Pipers of the Dirtbag Left Want to Lead Everyone to Bernie Sanders (NY Times)
Image: Tom Brenner

[ed. Character assassination by association. This type of article is a good example of how the media (and freaked-out elites) do their dirty business. They must be pretty scared. See also: Finally, Can We All Agree? Everything We Were Told About Bernie Sanders Was Wrong (The Intercept).]

Kanye, Out West

It’s surprising that a global celebrity who frequently self-identifies as the greatest artist living or dead has become an everyday presence in a tightly connected town of about 10,000 people. It’s more surprising just how much the town’s leaders want him to stay.

There Kanye West is at the McDonald’s, the Best Western and the Boot Barn. He hangs out at the Cody Steakhouse on the main drag, where he met one of his intern videographers, a student at Cody High School. His ranch is close to town, and to get where he needs to go, Kanye drives around town in a fleet of blacked-out Ford Raptors, the exact number of which is a topic of local speculation. Gina Mummery, the saleswoman at the Fremont Motor Company dealership, would only say that she sold him between two and six.

Kanye started taking trips to Wyoming regularly in 2017, shortly after he was hospitalized for what was characterized on a dispatch call as a “psychiatric emergency.” He spent lots of time making music in the state in 2018, holding an incredible listening party for his album “Ye” in late May in Jackson, a town famous for its skiing, fishing and ultrawealthy residents.

And then, in September, The Cody Enterprise reported that he’d bought a property called Monster Lake Ranch, about eight miles outside Cody, which is a five-hour drive northeast from Jackson. Suddenly, he and his family, including his spouse, Kim Kardashian West, who is an entrepreneur, television star and law student, were there: zooming around on four-wheelers, crashing wedding preparations and shopping for clothing and jewelry on the town’s main street, Sheridan Avenue.

Since then, Kanye has recorded portions of his ninth studio album, “Jesus Is King,” in Cody. He purchased about 11 acres of commercial property within the town’s limits. He also purchased a second ranch about an hour away in the town of Greybull.

He has moved members of the Yeezy team into the area. In plans submitted to the city, he has detailed his intention to establish a prototype lab for the brand, in a warehouse on Road 2AB.

And he has been characteristically forthcoming about his long-term intentions. He has talked about going from “seed to sew” in Cody — that means farming the raw material and doing the manufacturing all in one place. He’s said he hopes the town will be for him what Dayton, Ohio, was for the Wright brothers.

But in the past several years, Kanye has announced so many plans. That he wants to start a church. That he plans to run for president in 2024. That he will invent a method for autocorrecting emoticons. That he aims to redesign the standard American home. That he might legally change his name to “Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West” for a year.

It can be hard, with Kanye West, to separate concrete plans from jokes, fancies or outlandish aspirations. For now, the people of Cody have to wait and see what develops. (...)

Cody was brought into being by Buffalo Bill Cody, another bombastic showman who was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the biggest celebrity in the world. More famous in his time than Theodore Roosevelt and better-traveled than the Grateful Dead in ours, Buffalo Bill basically invented the fantasy of the American West through his touring Wild West Show.

Founding a town in Wyoming was just one of Buffalo Bill’s many late-life enterprises. It has proved, in some ways, to be his most concrete legacy.

Cody was incorporated in 1901, becoming “the new center of William Cody’s continuing, almost manic entrepreneurialism,” the historian Louis S. Warren wrote in his 2005 book “Buffalo Bill’s America.”

Buffalo Bill advertised Cody in a Wild West show program, promising air that was “so pure, so sweet and so bracing” that it would act as an intoxicant to city-clogged lungs. In reality, the settlement was plopped down in the arid Big Horn Basin where the wind rarely stops blowing and there was once so much sulfur in the river that it was known as Stinking Water.

by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elliot Ross
[ed. Surreal.]

When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult

So, here’s the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It’s actually good for America. Also, it’s a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it’s no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we’ll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn’t believe in science.

From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we’ve gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we’ve been fearing.

And the results aren’t looking good.

The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.

Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. “We’ll leave the field open to microbes,” declared Tom Frieden, a much-admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from — basically, scary brown people — and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition.

And the microbes came.

The first reaction of the Trumpers was to see the coronavirus as a Chinese problem — and to see whatever is bad for China as being good for us. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, cheered it on as a development that would “accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

The story changed once it became clear that the virus was spreading well beyond China. At that point it became a hoax perpetrated by the news media. Rush Limbaugh weighed in: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

Limbaugh was, you may not be surprised to hear, projecting. Back in 2014 right-wing politicians and media did indeed try to politically weaponize a disease outbreak, the Ebola virus, with Trump himself responsible for more than 100 tweets denouncing the Obama administration’s response (which was actually competent and effective).

And in case you’re wondering, no, the coronavirus isn’t like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.

Financial markets evidently don’t agree that the virus is a hoax; by Thursday afternoon the Dow was off more than 3,000 points since last week. Falling markets appear to worry the administration more than the prospect of, you know, people dying. So Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economist, made a point of declaring that the virus was “contained” — contradicting the C.D.C. — and suggested that Americans buy stocks. The market continued to drop.

At that point the administration appears to have finally realized that it might need to do something beyond insisting that things were great. But according to The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, it initially proposed paying for a virus response by cutting aid to the poor — specifically, low-income heating subsidies. Cruelty in all things.

On Wednesday Trump held a news conference on the virus, much of it devoted to incoherent jabs at Democrats and the media. He did, however, announce the leader of the government response to the threat. Instead of putting a health care professional in charge, however, he handed the job to Vice President Mike Pence, who has an interesting relationship with both health policy and science.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gabriella Demczuk

Graphic Designs of Japanese Modernism

Saitō Kazō, The Cabaret Hostess’s Song, 1930

From: Vibrant, progressive and bold: graphic designs of Japanese modernism – in pictures (The Guardian).

[ed. If you like Japanese art deco (as I do), get Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945 from the exhibit of the same name. It's a bit pricey but well worth it. See also: An Urbane and Unexpected Leap From West to East (NY Times).]

Disaster Capitalism

Amazon has barred a million products for making false coronavirus claims (while removing tens of thousands for price gouging - The Verge).

Image: Vivek Prakash/AFP/Getty via

[ed. Never let a good disaster go to waste. See also: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein), and As Covid-19 Spreads, Amazon Tries to Curb Mask Price Gouging (Wired).]

Checkup for $30, Teeth Cleaning $25: Walmart Gets Into Health Care

The main drag of Calhoun, Ga., a town of about 16,000 an hour’s drive north of Atlanta, is dotted with pawnshops, liquor stores, and fast-food joints. Here, as in thousands of other communities across America, the local Walmart fulfills most everyday needs—groceries, car repairs, money transfers, even hair styling. But now visitors to the Calhoun Walmart can also get a $30 medical checkup or a $25 teeth cleaning, or talk about their anxieties with a counselor for $1 a minute.

Prices for those services and more are clearly listed on bright digital billboards in a cozy waiting room inside a new Walmart Health center. Walk-ins are welcome, but most appointments are booked online beforehand. No insurance? No problem. Need a lab test on a Sunday? Sure thing.

Walmart “care hosts” take customers from the waiting area to one of 12 care rooms in the 6,500-square-foot facility. Afterward, patients are steered to the in-store pharmacy. While they wait for their prescriptions, they can visit the produce section and grab some veggies recommended by the doctor. Later, there’s even a free Zumba class in the community room.

Welcome to health care, Walmart style.

The center in Calhoun, along with one about an hour south in Dallas, Ga., represents the retailer’s attempt to grab a bigger slice of the nation’s $3.6 trillion in health spending by harnessing its greatest asset—the 150 million people coming through its 4,756 stores each week. While Walmart hasn’t said how many clinics it plans to build, it’s signaled that the health center expansion is one of its top growth initiatives. The move pits Walmart against rivals such as CVS Health Corp., which is rolling out its own “HealthHubs,” and creates a new front in Walmart’s battle against Amazon.com Inc., which also wants to disrupt the U.S. health-care system. “We have an opportunity to help the country and to build a stronger business,” Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon told investors in December.

It won’t be easy to persuade Americans to entrust their health to a big-box discount retailer, especially one that still sells unhealthy items such as cigarettes and guns and has long been criticized for skimping on the health-care needs of its own employees.

Even McMillon, whose father was a dentist, admits he “just can’t imagine being a dentist working at Walmart,” and he’s not alone. When Dee Artis saw an online job listing for a Walmart Health center, she didn’t believe it: “I thought it was spam,” she recalls. She’s now the assistant clinical administrator at the location in Dallas, an Atlanta suburb, which has been busy since opening in September and has drawn patients—many of them uninsured—from towns as far away as a 75-minute drive. “I knew it would be big because hey, this is Walmart,” Artis says. “But I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be.”

The man responsible for determining that is Sean Slovenski, Walmart’s president for U.S. health and wellness, who joined the retailer in 2018 after stints at insurer Humana Inc., where he oversaw innovation, and a health-care joint venture between Intel Corp. and General Electric Co. Now he’s in charge of a $36 billion division that already fills upwards of 400 million prescriptions annually and operates 3,000 vision centers.

by Matthew Boyle, Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Peyton Fuford

1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GT

1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GT
via: here and here (more pics)

[ed. For when I make my first billion. Click on the links for more pictures.]

Backroom Deals

Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, hear constant warnings from allies about congressional losses in November if the party nominates Bernie Sanders for president. Democratic House members share their Sanders fears on text-messaging chains. Bill Clinton, in calls with old friends, vents about the party getting wiped out in the general election.

And officials in the national and state parties are increasingly anxious about splintered primaries on Super Tuesday and beyond, where the liberal Mr. Sanders edges out moderate candidates who collectively win more votes.

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Such a situation may result in a brokered convention, a messy political battle the likes of which Democrats have not seen since 1952, when the nominee was Adlai Stevenson.

“We’re way, way, way past the day where party leaders can determine an outcome here, but I think there’s a vibrant conversation about whether there is anything that can be done,” said Jim Himes, a Connecticut congressman and superdelegate, who believed the nominee should have a majority of delegates.

From California to the Carolinas, and North Dakota to Ohio, the party leaders say they worry that Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist with passionate but limited support so far, will lose to President Trump, and drag down moderate House and Senate candidates in swing states with his left-wing agenda of “Medicare for all” and free four-year public college.

Mr. Sanders and his advisers insist that the opposite is true — that his ideas will generate huge excitement among young and working-class voters, and lead to record turnout. Such hopes have yet to be borne out in nominating contests so far.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”

This article is based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders. A vast majority of those superdelegates — whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and D.N.C. members — predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee. (...)

Officials at the Democratic National Committee maintain that it is highly improbable to head to the convention without an assured nominee. Historically, superdelegates had always supported the candidate who won the most pledged delegates, which accrue from primary and caucus wins. While those delegates are proportioned based on the results of those elections, they are not legally bound — meaning that they are technically free to change their votes as the race progresses.

by Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

[ed. The Dems are trying their damnedest to lose this election (and it's working). See also: The Primaries Are Just Dumb (NY Times), and Mike Bloomberg’s Campaign is Polluting the Internet (The Guardian).]

Sexy Baby Voice

The new Netflix show Love is Blind – in which people fall in love and get engaged without seeing each other first – has sparked many questions. These include: shouldn’t these people be in therapy? If looks don’t matter, why are they all so hot? And: what is up with Jessica Batten’s sexy baby voice?

I can’t take credit for that term: it was actually coined on Twitter last week, and written about since. “Sexy baby voice” may sound like an oxymoron, but it is in fact an affectation that a lot of women use. Just look at the clip in which Batten is first shown to be very capable of speaking in a normal adult voice, before just a moment later sounding like she has a tampon in each nostril.

But is sexy baby voice really, truly a thing? Why would a woman opt to sound like a tiny scared creature? What exactly is sexy about sounding like a baby?

Sociologist Anne Karpf wrote an entire book about the human voice and how it is far less anatomically determined than we think. We use our voice to denote status, power, wealth – and it is affected by society. Women’s voices have deepened over the last 40 years, and are more similar to men’s voices in more egalitarian countries.

Many of us hate hearing our voice played back to us, which some say is because we are used to hearing our own voice through our bones (which sounds less high-pitched) rather than unfiltered through the air. But Karpf believes our voices embarrass us because we hear in them the things we hoped to have edited out. Like a Freudian slip, they tell people things about us we would rather they didn’t know. “We feel betrayed by them,” she says.

“If the contestant heard that baby voice played back to her, she would probably be squirming with discomfort,” says Karpf.

We all hold multiple voices – one for our boss, our parents, our partner and so on. We switch between these, sometimes at will, sometimes unconsciously, to appear more powerful, to ask for protection and so on.

For women, the desire to “baby-talk” can be especially strong because of societal pressure to protect a man’s ego. “Often, extremely bright women have huge difficulty using their voice. They are terrified to use the full force of it. I’ve rarely encountered a man with that same problem,” Karpf says.

Women’s voices have always been contentious. Karpf reminds us that women were once banned from speaking in church in case their voices caused impure thoughts in a man, and they were thought to be too emotional for newsreading.

“Women’s voices have always been seen in relation to the desire that they’ve evoked in men rather than the desires of the woman and what she wants to express,” she says. And so comes sexy baby voice: “Babies don’t possess social power, economic power, or sexual power.”

So are we all being sexist for judging women who use a baby voice?

by Poppy Noor, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy Stock

[ed. Umm... because it works? (I'm not defining what 'works' means). C'mon, leave it alone. No need for more political correctness. Just let people relate to each other in any way they find most satisfying. ]